Last week there were too many questions we wanted to answer to fit it all into one post so here's a second round up of eight reader questions and brief answers. Ahem. (One answer is most definitely not brief.)
MATT ST CLAIR: When I saw Laura Linney in the trailer for Sully, my heart sank because it saddened me to see another great actress stuck in those stock "wife worrying over the phone" roles. When do you think Hollywood will ever get tired of seeing older women portrayed as supportive wifes or mothers and let more of them be in charge of their own stories?
How I wish I had a good answer to this. The answer might be a more diverse body of people telling stories because then chances are slightly better that it won't always be straight white 30-50something men as protagonists. Now, it's worth noting that it's been largely straight white men directing movies for about 100 years now and there were periods, long before our modern one, when men in charge of storytelling were interested in women and knew how to showcase them. I don't know what happened to make the alpha directors so disinterested in women's stories but whatever it was, I hate it. I guess it changed around the time Scorsese, Coppola, and Spielberg all exploded into fame together (not that we're blaming them) and none of them happened to have much interest in the ladies beyond a key atypical project each. As time wore on into the 80s and 90s less and less female projects were made. Give us more descendants of William Wyler, Douglas Sirk, and Alfred Hitchcock, Hollywood! We've got enough Spielberg & Scorsese acolytes to last another 50 years.
JAMES FROM AMES: What character actor's performance was so good it made you go from "hey, it's that guy" to "who is THAT?" and start following their work? For me: Mary Kay Place just floored me in Being John Malkovich. I was so pleased when she popped up in Lady Dynamite this year.
Mary Kay Place on the 7½ floor in "Being John Malkovich"
Mary Kay Place is a wonder, isn't she?...
I've loved her since the one two punch of My So Called Life and Citizen Ruth in the mid 90s (I had seen her before that in a few things but that was when I really noticed how perfectly she could serve it up). Curiously I am drawing a blank on this question though. IMDb has made looking up actors careers so easy that's it's tougher to remember those WOW! GIVE ME MORE OF THIS moments that stick. When I was a kid I actually used to race home from movies and scribble down names I saw in the credits that intrigued me. When Beetlejuice came out I may have been the only person anywhere in the world going "[SQUEAL] it's the new Winona Ryder movie!" because I'd scribbled down her name after watching her debut in Lucas (1986) and was madly in love already. I also remember trying to find out about Steven Hill before the internet because his work as the estranged father in Running on Empty just crushed my heart and stomped all over it.
In this new century it happens to me less frequently because I pay so much attention and generally get into people when they're fairly new but current favorite below the title character actors that I remember looking up after I first noticed them and who I'm still always excited to see are David Dastmalchian, Ann Dowd, Michael Peña, Dominic Rains, and Celia Weston.
V: If you could invite 3 or 4 movie characters to record the Film Experience podcast with you. Who would it be and why? What would be the topic of discussion?
Oh my. What a question. Possibilities are infinite so I'm just going to say four characters that come to mind really fast and leave it at that the. First two pairs: the "existential detectives" from I ♥️ Huckabees, and "Joy & Sadness" from Inside Out. Then, "Jasmine" from Blue Jasmine and "Megan" from Bridesmaids because it would be psychotically entertaining and boozy and train of thought/tough-love hilarious respectively. But when I think of how bad the sound is on the podcast maybe I should choose any Angela Bassett character since she's the queen of enunciation. So let's say "Mace" from Strange Days to the mix because she likes to drop truth bombs.
The topic. Oh, what the hell, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
LESTER: You can give out three Oscars to actresses of color who you thought deserved one and the only catch is that one has to Black, one Hispanic, and one Asian who would you pick?
Let's take them in chronological order with the disclaimer that actresses are actresses and we hope that one day such "categorization" won't be all that important as the world becomes more diverse and hopefully Hollywood becomes more comfortable with diversity. You don't even have to look outside of Oscar's wheelhouse to do this either. First up is Sonia Braga (I will assume you would include Latinas in the spirit of your question) who I thought deserved the statue in 1985 for Kiss of the Spider-Woman. Oscar loved the movie (4 nominations in top categories) but despite a Globe nomination, Sonia was shut out. Next is Gong Li who took the NYFCC Supporting Actress prize in 1993 for the foreign hit Farewell My Concubine. It was her fourth arthouse hit in four years Stateside so she was already a very big deal and it was a perfect time to honor her after so much audience goodwill. Plus, she was better than any of the nominees that year. Lastly everyone reading this site for any length of time knows that I think Viola Davis deserved the Best Actress win for The Help (2011) a movie which she considerably elevated with her deeply soulful work.
SANTY: Is it possible to redo a Smackdown year? 1985 only had two panelists...
I had to look this up. I was like "that can't be true!" but it is. Yeah, I don't think two is enough. But for now I'm concentrating on years that weren't done before. Next up is 1984. Get your ballots in.
MARIE: Do you agree or disagree with the assessment that Meryl Streep has no classic films on her resume?
Wildly disagree. Manhattan (1979), Kramer vs Kramer (1979), Silkwood (1983) are all really great films. And after that you can find people (including me) who will make a case for Postcards From the Edge (1990) which is severely undervalued as an inside Hollywood entertainment and Death Becomes Her (1992) which is, at the very least, a camp classic. Then you've got Adaptation (2002) and The Hours (2002). Finally, I honestly think that The Devil Wears Prada (2006) is becoming a classic. Classics don't have to be perfect films. Many non-great films have become classics through the force of one or more iconic elements (which Prada definitely has) and the sheer volume of audience devotion. You'd be hard pressed to argue, for example, that the original Ghostbusters (1984) which has been discussed so much this summer is not a classic, but it is most definitely NOT a good film. I know because I've watched it recently.
The reason this idea that Meryl has no classic films has taken hold though is that she has too often worked on films that were beneath her gifts or, rather, that had little to offer other than her considerable gifts. It's truly unfortunate because when she does work with directors in her paygrade (of talent) the results are usually spectacular.
PEGGY SUE: Why aren't you watching The Affair? It's the show that calmed down my Mad Men's abstinence.
I don't know or even think I want to know what 'Mad Men abstinence' is. As for The Affair, I watched about four episodes but it didn't really speak to me. I liked the conceit more than the execution and I wasn't obsessed enough with the performances to sustain me through it since it's basically a performance show. I did think that Ruth Wilson was quite strong, though.
TRAVIS: As the awareness of trans issues gets wider, and binary definitions of gender become less relevant, what do you think this will mean for the Best Actress/Actor/Supporting categories at the Oscars? And will your answer to that question mean good or bad things for the Oscars?
Linda Hunt in her Oscar winning role (with Mel Gibson) in "The Year of Living Dangerously"
Gender isn't often discussed in Oscar context outside of the statistical differences between male and female actors. I've seen gender identity become a mainstream talking point in relation to the Oscars only twice in my lifetime. The first was in the early Eighties (1982 and 1983 specifically) when the term "genderbending" was a very trendy and oft deployed mainstream descriptor for films like Tootsie, Victor/Victoria, Yentl, The World According to Garp, and The Year of Living Dangerously. Now the characters in these films were hardly homogenous - there were trans, gay, and straight characters in those films some in "drag," some not.
Consider the very difficult-to-label case of Linda Hunt. She was not an out lesbian actor at the time so we had a case of a cisgendered assumed-to-be-heterosexual-but-actually-gay white woman playing a cisgendered heterosexual Asian man; there was no "genderbending" in the script, just in the casting/performance. So yes, binaries are very limiting. But that's why there are so many identity modifiers.
Jaye Davison in "The Crying Game"The second time I remember gender identity becoming a talking point was when Jaye Davison received the Supporting Actor nomination for The Crying Game (1992) in which he played a trans woman though people were not frequently using the term "trans" back then in the same way that they do now. Some critics were upset that the well guarded "twist" of the movie was revealed by the nomination. Some media outlets joked that Davison should have been nominated for Supporting Actress instead. Now, had Jaye Davison come out as a trans woman, that line of thinking might have made sense albeit retroactively. But that was not the case. This was a homosexual man playing a trans heterosexual woman, so the Supporting Actor category was the right place for him.
This was a long answer on a touchy topic. But my basic feeling is that the mainstream's feelings about the binary nature of gender are never going to change very much. Mostly because trans is largely, at least as its currently used, still a binary modifier. The actress Laverne Cox, for example, is not something totally outside the binary, she's a trans woman. I think we'd have to have a large number of trans people refusing to be identified as either man or woman for people to really think of gender as anything other than a binary identity with minor variations.
All that said, I hope Oscar never drops the gendering of categories because sexism has been around since the world began and it's not dying anytime soon. It would be absolutely sickening to see women pushed out of the Best Acting conversation in favor of men. I firmly believe that that's what would happen because misogyny is a sickness that all too many people in the world don't wish to ever find a cure for.
whew. that was a lot.
YOUR TURN, READERS. What do you make of these questions and answers? I'd love to hear more opinions on these topics. Which character actors always bring a smile to your face when you realize they're involved in a movie or TV show? How long do you think it will be before a trans actors start being regularly cast as trans characters and we get a nominee? Do you think Linda Hunt deserved the Oscar in 83? ( My vote would've been for Cher in Silkwood because my two favorites from that year were not nominated. They were Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface and Sandra Bernhard in The King of Comedy.